Piano Recital — James Lisney at Rudolfinum

About the Event

For an extraordinary evening of piano classics, visit the impressive Rudolfinum in Prague to hear the masterpieces of Schubert, Beethoven, Haydn and Liszt.

Franz Schubert

During his rather short life, Franz Schubert, one of the fathers of romanticism in music, had always been an unappreciated genius who had never received public acclaim. Only his family and friends were delighted by his music, and most of his works were discovered and published only many years after his death. Franz Schubert was born on the 31th of March 1797 in the suburbs of Vienna. His father and eldest brother were amateur musicians and they taught him to play piano and violin. At the age of 11 Schubert was a singer in a choir at the Lichtenthal parish and later auditioned for Antonio Salieri and admitted to the emperor’s choir. During that period young Franz started composing his own works.

However, after his voice broke he had to leave the choir and in 1814 he started working as a teacher in the same parish school as his father. He never stopped composing and 4 years later he decided to quit teaching and devote his life completely to music. He fell out with his father because of that and struggled to make ends meet. In 1818 Schubert went to Vienna, where he met Vogl. Together they gave private concerts in small aristocratic circles, mainly playing Lieder, which Schubert wrote around 600. Franz Schubert gave only one big public concert in his whole life in March 1828, which was very warmly received by the audience. However, his health was deteriorating and in November the same year he died of thyroid fever at the age of 31.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German pianist and composer of the late 18th century. He is well known as the most influential composers of all time as well as crucial figure to the Classical music scene. In fact, he demonstrated his musical talent at an early age, taking lessons from his father and composer/conductor Christian Gottlob Neefe. Later, he moved to Vienna where he gained the reputation of a virtuoso pianist by composing his popular masterpieces. He created his most admired works in his last 15 years of life, all the while being almost completely deaf.

Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, pianist and conductor of the 19th century Romantic era. He was well‐known for his prodigious virtuosic skill as a pianist all over Europe. In fact, he was one of the most prominent representatives of the New German School Neudeutsche Schule as a composer. Over the course of his career he created extensive and diverse bodies of works that influenced contemporaries and anticipated many 20th‐century ideas and trends. For instance, his most notable musical contributions were the invention of the symphonic poem, making radical departures in harmony and developing the concept of thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form.